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THE NATURAL INTUITIVE

Nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas.

CARL JUNG

 

 

 

 

INTUITION: you can’t touch it or see it or find it on the Internet. I believe it is our subconscious mind speaking to us from dark and covert caves. If we do not listen, it will try to send its messages in dreams. Or else it becomes so insistent that we hear it even as an External Voice. Perhaps it is only our inner selves talking to ourselves, but sometimes it feels so different, so “otherworldly,” that you’d think it could be orchestrated by angels. Well, why not? Aren’t we part of the spiritual dimension? Aren’t we angels at times, acting on behalf of others and being moved occasionally (to our surprise) in mysterious ways—and always (how curious) to help another, even when we don’t know the other person is in need of help?

I heard of a woman who one day had the idea she should take some flowers to the old lady next door. When she knocked, she found the woman in tears. “I was just praying to God to send someone,” she said. “I felt so lonely. And now you’re here.”

Scientists proffer seven main theories to explain these heightened perceptions, each an appropriately academic mouthful: We have signal-transfer theory, goal-oriented theory, field theory, skeptical theory, collective-mind theory, multidimensional space/time theory, and quantum-mechanical theory, which is itself composed of five theorettes, one being the aforementioned concept of entangled minds. All this in addition to morphic fields, nonlocality, and thin-slicing of the brain. And still, no one has any idea what’s actually going on.

Intuition is some kind of swift intelligence that operates differently from logic, analysis, ratiocination. It is fragile, easily ignored, often overruled by critical doubt. It dislikes being poked and bullied by conscious reason. It has nothing to do with smarts. Oliver Wendell Holmes said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he was a second-rate intellect but had first-rate intuition.

Eighty-nine percent of women and seventy-two percent of men report having gut feelings about people or events. Seventy-eight percent of skeptics report gut feelings in which their stomachs felt tied in knots.

Some people have natural psychic gifts, just as some are more mathematically inclined than others. They are by nature open, willing, creative, and adventurous. Doesn’t every artist feel lifted sometimes by the Muse and carried effortlessly down that river of creativity, drawn hour after hour by the tide of the work and every word or note near perfect? We think of Mozart writing his symphonies vertically bar by bar across the pages, setting down the notes of all the instruments at once, as if he were hearing music dictated to him. Or of Saint Teresa of Ávila, who was once seen praying over her work as her feather dipped itself in ink and wrote without her hand. (Was it merely metaphor?) We marvel at the paintings that appeared mysteriously day after day at Lily Dale, the famous psychic community in upstate New York, while people gathered to watch the forms emerge on the canvas as if the magic brush of a Disney cartoon were pouring out color without a guiding hand.

What in God’s name is going on?

 

SKEPTICS WILL TELL YOU that what’s going on is a general decline in scientific education, the deplorable state of present-day unquestioning intellect. The National Science Foundation, in a periodic report entitled Science and Technology Indicators, which reviews the public understanding of science, found to its dismay a “widespread and growing” problem of belief in “pseudoscience.” A 2001 nationwide poll found that 60 percent of adult Americans believe that “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” When the respondents were separated by education, however, it was found to the horror of some that the higher the education, the more prevalent the belief, with 62 percent of those with high school degrees or higher in agreement! Belief in extrasensory perception in the United States, therefore, is not equated with ignorance and lack of education, and this is true worldwide, from Australia to Brazil. In Sweden, with its high literacy rate, the majority of the population believes in the paranormal.

It’s enough to drive a skeptic mad.

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy.

PROFESSOR PETER ATKINS, a chemist at Oxford
University who later admitted he had not studied
any of the evidence and neither did he feel
obliged to do so, as quoted in 2006
in the London Times

A PROFILE

Let’s cut to the chase: Studies show that people who believe in heightened awareness are not weak-minded, mentally ill, or lacking in critical faculties. They are not ignorant and uneducated. Nor are they superstitious, holding with outdated beliefs in witchcraft or demons or matters cabalistic and occult. It’s not that their brains are misfiring or subject to schizophrenic seizures, although both spiritual and psychic experiences are correlated with increased brain activity.

Creative and high-achieving people report more psychic experiences than those whose creativity has been choked off.

Well, then, who has these experiences? In 2003, at a conference at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, 465 people were asked about their education, allergies and bodily sensitivities, mental practices (such as meditation), and psi experiences. It was found that women reported more experiences than men and younger people more than older; that left-handed and ambidextrous individuals were significantly more likely to have experiences than right-handed ones; and that those who were psychic had a clear pattern of allergies and bodily sensitivities. Fifty percent of women were untelepathic, but 85 percent of the telepaths were female. They are younger, educated, and creative, with abilities of association and absorption. They have high focus or concentration.

A profile of a psychic would be: a left-handed, somewhat introverted, creative woman about age thirty or younger who is physically sensitive (perhaps with allergies), suffers perhaps from chronic anxiety, makes decisions based on emotion rather than logic, practices a mental discipline such as meditation, and is open, willing, courageous, unconventional, and curious. It’s interesting that creative and high-achieving people report more psychic experiences than those whose creativity has been stifled by social conditioning and inhibitions.

Studies show that ESP is associated with a relaxed state of mind and an unrestricted level of consciousness.

THE MYERS-BRIGGS TEST

I believe that everyone has intuition and moreover that it can be developed. But there’s no question some people have it to a higher degree than others. To the extreme intuitive, the psychic who listens to directions from a Higher Source or Self, it seems that everyone would have these abilities. I brought this up to a board member of the Society for Psychical Research in London. He looked at me in surprise and answered no. He had never had a psychic experience in his life, which didn’t mean that he wasn’t fascinated by the subject. Which is why he served on the Society board.

It was the famous Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung who developed the theory of differing personality types, depending on how people perceive the world and how they respond to it. He proposed the existence of two ways of thinking: the rational (judging) functions, which include thinking and sensing; and the irrational (perceiving) functions, including sensing and intuition. Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, took Jung’s idea and in the 1940s developed a series of psychological tests to provide an indicator for sixteen possible character traits that form our personality preferences. Since then millions have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tests, answering pages of seemingly unrelated questions and in the process discovering their own strengths and weaknesses—often with relief that it’s okay to be me!

The first series of questions determine whether you are an extrovert or an introvert. How do you engage the outer world? Do you restore your batteries in a social setting, or do you need long periods of silence, solitude? There’s an old joke: How to the extrovert “hell at a party” means “not getting in,” while to the introvert hell is “being there.” The extrovert is focused on the external world and social intercourse, the introvert on some deep inner communion. The one is often concerned with action, the other with the search for deep truths.

The second indicator refers to two distinct and contrasting ways of perceiving the world. How do you acquire information, through your five senses or by some inexplicable intuition? Those who prefer to rely on their senses may be so attuned to the physical world that they little heed the faint nudges of wisdom coming out of nowhere, the whispers of the heart.

The third series of questions reveal how a person processes information: by thinking in an analytical and logical fashion or by subjective feelings.

The fourth and last tests determine a person’s dominant mode of dealing with the external world: is she a “perceiver,” as they call it, studying and acquiring information with appropriate revision of one’s worldview, or, at the opposite pole, a “judging” type, coming quickly to decisions, reaching a verdict. To this latter personality type, the “judging” type, it almost doesn’t matter what decision is made as long as one is made! To the “perceiver,” reaching a conclusion is seen as eliminating options. It’s a denial of life itself! To the judging type, the hesitation and equivocation of the “perceiver,” who is always ready to change his mind, is anathema!

Each of these four inborn preferences, or personality traits, lies in opposition to its subordinate or auxiliary trait, so that all possible indicators combine to create the unique and individual you. You may be an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving (INFP), an Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judging (ESTJ), an Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving (ISTP), or any one of sixteen combinations. The dominant characteristics are only preferences, however, and a sensing type, for example, may tilt only slightly to that method of acquiring information, while also displaying a high degree of intuition. Moreover, as we mature, our childhood subordinate or auxiliary attribute is supposed to strengthen and balance out the dominant traits, until we have the ability to utilize all possible eight characteristics and with practice gain access to all qualities. You may be exceptionally intuitive as a child and prefer this method of receiving information, but it doesn’t mean you can’t train yourself to become aware of the sensory world around you. You may be an extrovert by nature but learn to enjoy solitude to such an extent that your introversion becomes almost as important.

For the highly social activist who receives information principally through his five senses, analyzes it by ratiocination, and lays claim to decisive closure, the difficulty may be the same as that of the dreamy, sensitive, intuitive type: He can’t imagine operating any other way. Of course he condemns those with intuitive or extrasensory heightened perceptions. He deems them charlatans, irresponsible, embarrassments to scientific inquiry. The idea of trusting the still, small, fragile whispers of intuition is for him improbable. And yet he, too, has intuitions and psychic experiences, and these come at him with exceptional and dramatic force, for how else could he be made aware of them?

I know a woman who says she has no intuition. She doesn’t miss it. She makes up for it with her intellectual brilliance and energy. I think she must be ESTJ. There are also those unfortunates who may have been scorched by disease, mind-addling addictions, or mental disorders, leaving their intuition impaired, but even these individuals can develop true intuition as they heal.

Then, too, there are some who mistrust these inner nudges, because of the troubling questions they raise: “How do I know my intuition comes from God?” they ask, dismissing the illusion of guidance as a form of dangerous egotism that threatens to lunge down a false path, carrying the whole family over the cliff.

As you grow sensitive to the ways that you receive intuition, you will observe that it is always on your side. Your intuition solves a problem, or it saves your life. It comes often as an inner warning, and later, as you become increasingly attuned, you notice it surrounds you constantly, offering little gifts and blessings. Soon you can’t tell the difference between intuition and simply getting on with life.

If, however, you have an urge to kill your wife, to steal, to defraud or oppress another, to create havoc by sexual misconduct or addiction, or if you are possessed by hatred and a desire for revenge, you may be certain this is not true “intuition.” I think that these hungers come from the darker side of our souls, asking not to be acted on but to be noticed in order to be healed.

An intuition is swift and fleeting. The urge to do harm, on the other hand, may be so intense and linger so long that you may even act on it. Moreover, you will feel aftereffects, both thrilling and disgusting, and the distaste has its own allure.

True intuition, frail, fragile, sensitive, elusive, never comes like that. It never harms.

Inviting Intuition I: Relaxed & Easy

Intuition is not reached through the conscious or thinking mind, which locks onto intellect, logic, and analysis. It is seen with the inarticulate dream-mind, the subconscious or unconscious. Please note, I’m using the words not in the classical model of ego, id, and superego as defined by Sigmund Freud but in the loose sense of the artist’s inventive mind: that part of the brain that we use when daydreaming, or sleeping, or weeding the garden mindlessly, or meditating, or absorbed in creating a painting, music, or other work of art.

For intuition, you need the simplicity of the child-mind, the dreaming mind that tosses out images and information when you are asleep. I think it’s important to encourage your children, therefore, to daydream, space out, go woolgathering. We don’t need to fill every moment of their days with activities. Let them learn to be alone, and the same holds true for adults too.

You need to be comfortable with silence and solitude. Learn to be quiet. Turn off the TV. Shut down the computer and video games. Befriend yourself. “Go watch the grass grow,” as my mother used to say. “Do nothing.” And you’ll be amazed how much is revealed to you by merely opening yourself to your environment, observing with attention and without judgment.

Allow yourself to dream. Your Higher Consciousness will point out where you ought to go.